Although advertisements on the web pages may degrade your experience, our business certainly depends on them and we can only keep providing you high-quality research based articles as long as we can display ads on our pages.

To view this article, you can disable your ad blocker and refresh this page or simply login.

Andreas Halvorsen co-founded Viking Global together his Tiger Management colleagues David Ott and Brian Olson back in 1999. Viking follows a bottom-up stock picking approach when it comes to investing. The fund takes long, as well as, short positions in equites.

The equity portfolio of Viking Global had a value of $23.54 billion at the end of the second quarter, up from $22.71 billion reported at the end of the previous quarter. The fund’s largest exposure was to the technology sector, which amassed 30% of the value. Viking Global also had 21% invested in healthcare stocks and 18% in the consumer discretionary sector. Moreover, during the second quarter, Viking initiated new positions in 13 companies and, in this article, we will focus on Viking Global’s top new picks.

We believe that imitating hedge funds and other large institutional investors can be helpful in identifying stocks capable of outperforming the broader market. Through extensive research that covered portfolios of several hundred large investors between 1999 and 2012, we determined that following the small-cap stocks that large money managers are collectively bullish on, can generate monthly returns nearly 1.0 percentage points above the market (see more details here).

In Intercontinental Exchange Inc (NYSE:ICE), Viking Global acquired 1.13 million shares during the second quarter, whose value stood at $290.13 million at the end of June. Overall, 49 funds from our database were long Intercontinental Exchange, holding $2.22 billion worth of shares, and amassing 7.30% of outstanding stock, compared to 48 funds holding $2.20 billion worth of shares a quarter earlier. Last month, Intercontinental Exchange reported second-quarter earnings of $3.43 per share, beating consensus estimate by $3.38 per share, while its revenue of $1.13 billion, topped the expectations by $10 million.

Viking Global bought 5.63 million shares of Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) during the second quarter, which were valued at $288.28 million at the end of June. Microsoft was one of the most popular stocks among the funds we track, with 131 funds holding $18.81 billion worth of shares at the end of June, down from 144 funds holding $20.83 billion worth shares at the end of the first quarter. Earlier this week, Microsoft announced a dividend of $0.39 per share, up by around 8% from the previous one, which gives its stock a forward yield of 2.75%. Microsoft is scheduled to release its fiscal first-quarter results on October 20 and it is expected to report earnings of $0.68 per share for its fiscal first quarter on revenue of $21.71 billion.